The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) promotes the academic study of Palestine by supporting research, teaching, and intellectual collaboration among scholars within Columbia University and beyond.
CPS provides an institutional home for faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and students at Columbia in fields that include history, literary studies, the social sciences, religion, philosophy, law, archaeology, architecture, and the arts. CPS also builds connections with other institutions and scholars to strengthen the academic study of Palestine and Palestinians throughout the United States and the world.
Founded in 2010, the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University is the first and only such center in an academic institution in the United States. The creation of the Center honors the legacy of Professor Edward Said at the university where he taught for forty years. Columbia University, founded in the City of New York in 1754, and one of the premier research universities in the world, is the professional home to a unique concentration of distinguished scholars on Palestine, as well as to an award-winning supporting faculty in a variety of disciplines. The Center for Palestine Studies was founded to build on this world-class academic strength.
The Center’s mission is to nourish first-rate scholarship on the question of Palestine by researchers in Palestine and the Diaspora, as well as non-Palestinian scholars who work on Palestine. In pursuit of this goal, we follow Edward Said’s vision that critical scholarship is fundamental to changing the public conversation on Palestine, and especially the debates underway in the United States. In contrast to the plethora of institutes and centers for Israel Studies found at virtually every elite American university, no parallel institutional home existed for those who work on Palestine. We therefore established an institutional home for an alternative scholarly and public conversation about Israel and Palestine. The Center for Palestine Studies is that home.
